It’s been six years because the begin of the pandemic, however some firms are nonetheless embracing distant work tradition (albeit only a few). However even fewer firms are ushering in a brand new office development: the four-day workweek.
It’s change into a norm for some organizations in Japan and has been examined within the U.Ok. However till lately, a really choose few U.S.-based organizations have even given it a shot.
One exception: Kickstarter, a world crowdfunding platform. Its estimated 200 to 400 U.S. staff work absolutely distant, and work simply 4 days every week for a complete of 32 hours.
“I wanted to be empathetic at a time where a lot of CEOs were like, ‘We need to make people return back to the office,’” Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor lately advised The New York Occasions.
Whereas he says he does this as a result of he needs staff to dwell a “fulfilled and beautiful” life, his work requirements don’t change simply because staff are working fewer hours.
“I have a very high bar for work and excellence,” he mentioned.
And as he ought to. Kickstarter was based in 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler as a method to fund inventive tasks exterior conventional finance. It grew explosively in its early years: By 2011, tens of hundreds of tasks had been efficiently funded and pledges had climbed into the tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars}.
Inside about 5 years, backers had pledged greater than $1 billion to campaigns on the location. As of early 2025, backers have pledged greater than $8.5 billion throughout roughly 650,000 tasks, and a mission success fee simply over 40%, in line with Statista.
However even with that success, the four-day, distant work week isn’t an ideal science, Taylor admitted.
“It’s not all good. You have to trust people to be responsible,” he mentioned. “We know that not everyone’s responsible. A lot of people don’t even work 40 hours in a five-day workweek.”
Plus, he worries this setup encourages folks to use to Kickstarter solely as a result of they need a four-day, distant work week, and never as a result of they’re genuinely within the firm or its mission.
“We have attracted some of those people,” he mentioned. “If you’re not at Kickstarter for the right reasons, I don’t want you here.”
He additionally admitted a four-day work week additionally doesn’t enable for a similar quantity of labor to get executed—and it means folks should work tougher through the hours they’re on.
“The math doesn’t math,” he mentioned. “The level of intensity, intention and velocity that you have to bring in everything that you do is extreme.”
What different CEOs say a few four-day work week
Whereas championing the four-day work week from the angle of including to the work-life stability and psychological well being of his staff, Taylor additionally absolutely acknowledged the pitfalls of that work setup.
Different CEOs are additionally break up on whether or not a four-day week is a brilliant guess or dangerous distraction, mirroring Taylor’s mixture of optimism and nervousness about output.
Ryan Breslow, founding father of fintech startup Bolt, made his firm’s four-day week everlasting after trialing it, and referred to as it an “absolute no brainer,” arguing a shorter week really raised the bar on execution and productiveness as a substitute of reducing it.
“This is a selfish thing that we’re doing because our hypothesis is that not only would employees be engaged and healthier, but they’d be more productive at work,” Breslow advised Inc. in 2022. “And that’s what we’ve got. We found that the four days that they’re here, they’re overwhelmingly more productive than your traditional five-day week.”
Different enterprise leaders have trialed, however then dialed again, four-day work week experiments after seeing the pressure of compressing 5 days of labor into 4. Executives at workflow software program agency Formstack reported double-digit beneficial properties in productiveness, flexibility, and happiness throughout a shortened-week pilot—however they noticed a 27% soar in stress as staff frightened about cramming their workload into much less time.
So as a substitute, the corporate moved towards a half day on Fridays as a substitute of a real four-day work week.
“It was truly a win-win situation as output increased and employees had more flexibility with their work-life balance,” Tammy Polk, former chief human assets officer at Formstack, advised Forbes. “Employees also enjoyed sharing how they spent their half days on Slack and social media, which strengthened our remote company culture even further.”
Different CEOs are skeptical of the four-day week altogether, arguing it doesn’t match how most firms really function. However some high-profile CEOs together with Tesla’ Elon Musk and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon have mentioned AI may make it attainable sooner or later.
As a result of AI will “affect every application, every job, every customer interface,” Dimon argued on the America Enterprise Discussion board in Miami in November, “my guess is the developed world will be working three and a half days a week in 20, 30, 40 years, and have wonderful lives.”
